Tono-Bungay. H. G. Wells

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       H. G. Wells

      Tono-Bungay

      Published by

      Books

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       [email protected]

      2020 OK Publishing

      EAN 4064066395056

Table of Contents

       BOOK THE FIRST THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED

       CHAPTER THE FIRST OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY

       CHAPTER THE SECOND OF MY LAUNCH INTO THE WORLD AND THE LAST I SAW OF BLADESOVER

       CHAPTER THE THIRD THE WIMBLEHURST APPRENTICESHIP

       BOOK THE SECOND THE RISE OF TONO-BUNGAY

       CHAPTER THE FIRST HOW I BECAME A LONDON STUDENT AND WENT ASTRAY

       CHAPTER THE SECOND THE DAWN COMES, AND MY UNCLE APPEARS IN A NEW SILK HAT

       CHAPTER THE THIRD HOW We MADE TONO-BUNGAY HUM

       CHAPTER THE FOURTH MARION I

       BOOK THE THIRD THE GREAT DAYS OF TONO-BUNGAY

       CHAPTER THE FIRST THE HARDINGHAM HOTEL, AND HOW We BECAME BIG PEOPLE

       CHAPTER THE SECOND OUR PROGRESS FROM CAMDEN TOWN TO CREST HILL

       CHAPTER THE THIRD SOARING

       CHAPTER THE FOURTH HOW I STOLE THE HEAPS OF QUAP FROM MORDET ISLAND

       BOOK THE FOURTH THE AFTERMATH OF TONO-BUNGAY

       CHAPTER THE FIRST THE STICK OF THE ROCKET

       CHAPTER THE SECOND LOVE AMONG THE WRECKAGE

       CHAPTER THE THIRD NIGHT AND THE OPEN SEA

      BOOK THE FIRST

       THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER THE FIRST

       OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY

       Table of Contents

      I

      Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than “character actors.” They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one’s stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacks — the unjustifiable gifts of footmen — in pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and — to go to my other extreme — I was once — oh, glittering days! — an item in the house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I’ve seen these people at various angles. At the dinner-table I’ve met not simply the titled but the great. On one occasion — it is my brightest memory — I upset my champagne over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire — Heaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him! — in the warmth of our mutual admiration.

      And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered a man….

      Yes, I’ve seen a curious variety of people and ways of living altogether. Odd people they all are great and small, very much alike at bottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I wish I had ranged just a little further both up and down, seeing I have ranged so far. Royalty must be worth knowing and very great fun. But my contacts with princes have been limited to quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on the highroads drunk but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summertime, with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children, a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies, farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834 beerhouses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now for ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been negligible; I once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst of what was no doubt snobbishness, did my best to get him in the legs. But that failed.

      I’m sorry I haven’t done the whole lot though….

      You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range, this extensive cross-section of the British social organism. It was the Accident of Birth. It always is in England.

      Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is by the way. I was my uncle’s nephew, and my uncle was no less a person than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of the financial heavens happened — it is now ten years ago! Do you remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? Perhaps you had a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him only too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty heavens — like a comet — rather, like a stupendous rocket! — and overawed investors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon of domestic conveniences!